Northern Ireland shows no sign of bowing to austerity push

Monday is lifeguard training day at the swimming pool in the well kept, exceptionally well equipped leisure centre in Dungannon. A handful of schoolchildren are navigating two lanes of the 25-metre pool as an instructor barks encouragement.

Ann McRoberts, who runs the leisure centre, says the pool is a treasured local amenity. It is one of four owned and maintained by the Mid-Ulster District Council here and in neighbouring towns across this part of central Northern Ireland, bordered by Lough Neagh on one side and the Republic of Ireland on another. The leisure centre, opened in the 1970s and completely refurbished in the 1990s, has been extended and improved in the past four years.

The recently opened, publicly-funded pool in Magherafelt, 20 miles away, is Olympic sized, though council officials are at pains to point out that, with just six lanes, it is not Olympic standard.

These expensive amenities are the sort of municipal service that austerity-ravaged local governments elsewhere in the UK (and in the Republic) have either privatised or mothballed. Yet in Northern Ireland, ferocious opposition to budget austerity from parties that agree on nothing else has ensured that "Tory cuts", as Sinn Fein condemns them, are virtually unheard of across much of the province.

"We're working under huge spending pressure, but we intend to protect the vulnerable," says Linda Dillon, chair of Mid-Ulster District Council and a Sinn Fein local councillor. "To allow the sort of cuts to come through as [is happening in] England would have an extremely negative effect on the people I represent."

As the UK general election campaign is showing, austerity is part of the electoral narrative in much of Britain. They do things differently in post-conflict, equality-obsessed Northern Ireland. From local services to welfare spending to university tuition fees to the state-dominated economy, this part of the UK is an austerity-free zone. To drive the point home, another 50-metre pool was opened two years ago in Bangor, a town east of Belfast.

As Richard Ramsey, chief economist at Ulster Bank, says: "Before austerity, Northern Ireland had no Olympic-sized pools. Now that austerity is supposed to be here, two of them appear."

Graham Brownlow, an economist at Queen's University Belfast, says parts of northern England are much more rundown than towns such as Dungannon, which has been restored after the Troubles with lavish public spending, after the closure of a military base.

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Neither Sinn Fein nor the Democratic Unionist party, which control the assembly, have embraced the UK government's economic and reform agenda. They refuse to legislate for welfare cuts. "Because we have stopped the welfare cuts, welfare is not an issue on the doorstep," Ms Dillon says.

That is one reason the Northern Irish economy is in trouble. Public spending, much of it financed by direct payments from the Treasury in London, accounts for 75 per cent of its output. Economists - and even some politicians, such as the finance minister Simon Hamilton - frequently warn that this is not sustainable. Yet there is little sign that political leaders in Northern Ireland are ready to rebalance the economy.

<>Some moves have been made towards the reform of local government. Mid-Ulster council was formed a month ago through the merger of local authorities in Dungannon, Magherafelt and Cookstown. But their combined £38m annual budget is intact, and so are staff numbers. And they continue to spend 23 per cent of that budget each year on recreation and sport - the second-highest cost to the council apart from waste collection and disposal.

Mr Ramsey says Northern Ireland is five years behind the rest of the UK on economic and public sector reform, including at the local level. "I get no sense that the councils have been cutting jobs and services over the past five years, and that would be a real concern looking at the next five years," he says. "They are just not prepared to make the hard choices."

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